Hold Fast Stand Sure

“Hold Fast, Stand Sure, I scream a revolution” is a sound sculpture created for Reid Gallery and Comar as part of Glasgow International 2016. It combines my interest in primitive impulses, invented tradition and our skewed relationship to nature. Taking my inspiration from the politically radical history of Garnethill (the surrounding area of the Reid Gallery), whilst considering the geographical significance of The Isle of Mull as a portal to the underworld. I continue my investigation in to “thin places” anomalies in the landscape which were viewed inpre - Christian times as access points to the afterlife. Garnethill is situated on a drumlin, a village like community nestled on a steep hill in the centre of Glasgow which has seen the rise of The Glasgow Girls, the Scottish suffrage movement, The Women’s Library and The Third Eye Centre (now the CCA).

The mushrooms cultural and mythological significance became a symbol for entering other worlds. Mushrooms are imbued in our consciousness as grotesque, magic and poisonous. Closer to humans than to plant life, this confusing specimen holds us in rapture and fear. Whilst at the same time they suggest a “radical mycology” in the way that they grow and live, creating possible solutions to our impending extinction.

As well as this ecological awakening I drew upon more classical representations of “thin places” on the Isle of Mull, such as the lost village of Craciag and its “hanging tree”, now upturned, where a witch was allegedly hung. This history of violence and trauma infuses a dreamscape of slippages and altered states of consciousness explored through DIY binaural recording techniques.

The Jug Choir

An army of ceramic warriors lies in wait, wounded, amputated and punctured. These warriors have travelled the country being sung into by different choirs in Edinburgh (Rhubaba Choir), Oxford and Cardiff. The Jug Choir is an unfolding sonic experiment that evolves with each set of singers who come to the jugs.

Can These Jugs Sing?

The Jug Choir explores the materiality of object and sound drawing on a rich history of jugs being used as musical instruments, from country blues jug bands to the psychedelic rock of the 13th Floor Elevators. Each ceramic vessel bears the face of a bearded man, referencing Bellermine Jugs of the 16th century that were used as common household objects. During the Witch Hunts of the 17th Century these jugs were transformed into 'Witches Bottles', a form of sympathetic magic used to ward off evil. A kind of voodoo ensued as the body of the male vessel was filled with urine, bent nails and votive cloth hearts, hoping to cause pain to any ‘witch’ that posed a threat.

The Jug Choir uses the 'Witches Bottles' as a vehicle to explore notions of gender and hysteria through the lens of war. This insurgent army’s sonic journey considers how ritual is embedded in acts of violence.

Black Diamond

On Sunday 30th August 2015 a rave boat travelled upstream from Neyland Marina to Haverfordwest, carrying a massive sound system that played Black Diamond, an electronic music track made with the people of Haverfordwest and composed by Andy Wheddon.

Mandolin players plucking at Port Lion, mysterious methane fizzing at Black Tar, a trombonist making elephant howls in the ruins of Boulston Manor. Histories of place and people converge with the early 90s rave culture of West Wales. Bringing the Western Cleddau to life on a high tide that breached the banks of Haverfordwest.

The boat was followed on land by the Black Diamond rave bus as it sailed past four points along the Cleddau where the audience encountered musical surprises performed by Shani Liz Wyman, Shell 'E' Bell, Richard Joseph and Zoe Davis and Llangwm Village Voices (4 of the 20 artists that contributed to the Black Diamond track).

In this new performance work Korda has been inspired by the parasitic behaviour of the cuckoo, who lays its eggs in a ‘host’ birds nest and leaves its young to hatch and destroy the hosts eggs. This ensures its survival, so that it alone can be nurtured by the ‘host’, that is unless the host is not tricked by its mimicry.

This is part of a new body of work entitled "Zuben Elgenubi - The Price to be Paid".

Aping The Beast

Aping the Beast used animal symbolism and folklore to explore our fear of the unknown and how we have evolved to confront these fears through imitation, spectacle, ritual and humour. At the centre of Aping the Beast was a 15 ft latex Godzilla inspired monster, which was bought to life three times over the course of the exhibition. The Awakening, convened local school children dressed as Boggarts, wizened old men from Lancashire folklore, to bring the Beast to life. The Fertility Orbit of the Boob Meteorite, was the Beast’s first sexual encounter with a multi-boobed goddess who performed her fertility rite, shot her load and died.Aping the Beast: The Procession, saw a procession of all the characters from previous performances join the Beast at Whitestone Pond, the highest point in London, a small man-made pond at the centre of a gyratory system. Spectators witnessed the Beast at loggerheads with two battleships. This was a re-enactment of an aquatic finale performed in 1940 that I found a written account of in the archives of Blackpool Tower Circus.

The show toured to The Grundy Blackpool and drew upon the spectacle and carnival of this infamous seaside resort.

Serena Korda discusses her exhibition 'Aping the Beast'

the awakening

The first performance as part of Aping the Beast. The portentous beast is awakened to its full terror in a ritual performed by 25 local school children dressed as wizened old men known as ‘Boggarts’ – characters from Lancashire folklore, believed to malevolently wield destructive powers. The performance convenes the human agency of the local community to bring the inanimate creature to life, exorcising its menacing tyranny. With live music by Grumbling Fur.

The Black Cat Auditions

Inspired by the hollywood black cat auditions of 1961 to find the perfect cat to appear alongside Vincent Price in 'Tales of Terror', I decided to hold my own auditioning process to find the star of my film 'The Prognosticator'. Following an open call for participants I visited people's houses to photograph their black cats armed with my set housed inside a large suitcase. The audition tested the cat’s ability to sit in front of a camera and to find the most majestic feline for the demanding lead role of a psychic black cat.

Fertility Orbit of the Boob Meteorite

Serena Korda - Fertility Orbit of the Boob Meteorite

The Transmitters

The Transmitters, examines the thin line between fan frenzy, freedom of expression and female hysteria. A group of women dance to music performed by two musicians bearing prosthetic ‘third eyes’. The choreography of this cult-like ritual is inspired by archival footage of fan-frenzied young women enraptured by Beatlemania. These scenes are spliced with terrifying images of the deadly Tarantula spider which alludes to the Italian folk phenomenon the Tarantism, historically performed as an antidote to the potentially fatal venom of a spider’s bites.

The Transmitters

The Prognosticator

The Prognosticator is a sculptural film installation that features in “Aping the Beast”.

The film emerged from a series of ‘Black Cat Auditions’ in which I visited people’s homes to photograph their black cat in order to find one that was compliant with the filming process. In the resulting film the relationship between Boo Cat – a majestic black feline character – and his doting owner, is suggestive of the familiar spirits that accompany practitioners of folk magic. The camera zooms in and out hypnotically focusing on Boo Cat’s eyes evoking the remote Russian healers who channelled supernatural powers through television broadcasts, during the collapes of the Soviet Union.

The Prognosticator

W.A.M.A

I was invited to Barton Hill back in June 2011 and as we walked around the estate, which had undergone a massive regeneration programme, I was struck by the invisibility of its history. Apart from the entrance columns to the trading estate and two small barn-like constructions on either side, nothing remains of The Great Western Cotton Mill that once employed most of Barton Hill’s inhabitants. The workers’ slum housing was demolished in the 1950’s and swiftly replaced by the iconic high-rise tower blocks that form the hub of the estate. Whilst the Netham Chemical Works are buried beneath what is now the Netham Park, a vast green open space (that became the site of the W.A.M.A dance), allowing us to forget the mountains of ‘Galligu’ chemical waste that children once frolicked and played in. This waste ground became known locally as the “Brillos” where heaps of waste would build up to form what has been described as a lunar landscape. There are very few signifiers hinting to this industrial past, a time of child labour and the forgotten art of meemoing, the cotton mill workers’ invented sign language that had developed as a means of communicating in a deafening environment.

Although these are all welcome improvements to people’s living and working conditions, it made me feel that perhaps regeneration comes at the cost of making the past somewhat invisible. W.A.M.A was inspired by a desire to make Barton Hill’s rich industrial heritage visible once again through an invented folk dance based on people’s working movements. Before developing W.A.M.A I had staged several invented folk dances that were concerned with revealing abandoned histories. Through W.A.M.A I had a chance to achieve a desire that had been brewing to create a ritual dance for a community, which has the potential to be restaged in the future.

We set about collecting together an archive of people’s working movements that would form the basis of the choreography for W.A.M.A. Surprisingly people were very willing to perform their work related movement to us in front of a camera, which often involved miming out a series of actions. We collected movements from over 100 people, across a wide range of occupations from a Lucipher to a Patcher. The archive and the dance that has developed are there to be passed on to future generations. This could take the form of a procession in costume from the Urban Park to the Netham, a recreation of the performance or simply a few turns of the Cotton Lamb maypole once a year.

W.A.M.A.

Laid to Rest

Dust is everywhere, it is part of us and the smallest of visible particles. “Laid to Rest” continues my fascination with the overlooked by transforming dust collected from houses, businesses and institutions into 500 commemorative bricks.

Inspired by the commercialization of waste in Victorian London from the dust heaps of Gray’s Inn Rd to the engineering achievements of Joseph Bazalgette’s sewage system. The dust heaps were monuments to the invisible and provided a major source of income. One of the industries to be born out of the heaps was London brick making: ash, cinders and rubbish from the heaps were mixed with the mud of nearby brick fields to produce the humble brick.

Each brick made as part of “Laid to Rest” contains specific dust from the contributing house, business or institution mixed in to clay. Imprinted on each brick are the contributor’s initials cataloguing their transformation from the barely visible to the palpable.

The brick stack grew over the course of the exhibition and a mythical marching band “The Brick Keepers” consecrated the bricks combining choral incantations and ritual dance in a tribute to the overlooked and forgotten.

Laid to Rest - The Brick Keepers Dance

Laid to Rest: The Procession

Laid to Rest, The Procession

RADAR

Training through Production, R.A.D.A.R commission

Inspired by Loughborough University’s history of training through production, and the Loughborough University archive material depicting images of mass movement; I made a new work involving a mass movement choir. Developed in the 1930s in Germany by Rudolf Laban, it employed the synchronised movement of a large group of people in outdoor locations, and has been adopted by many political groups to embody the spirit of community against adversity.

Training through Production drew upon Loughborough’s rich history of utopian industrialism, epitomized by Herbert Schofield, principle of The University between 1915 and 1950. The invented folk dance at the heart of the work was developed with the help of its participants, all amateur dance enthusiasts, and choreographer Rosie Heafford. During rehearsals the notion of finding choreography in the everyday underpinned the work’s development, with each participant contributing their own daily rituals to the dance’s evolution. The final performance moved from pitch to pitch by a procession, culminating at the Carillon playing a new composition by Daniel O’Sullivan, played by Caroline Sharpe.

With special thanks to the Loughborough Carillon, Peter Crooks and the Tuxedo Swing Band.

The Namer of Clouds Lived and Died Here

Everyday on my way to work I used to pass a derelict house, No 7 Bruce Grove. The house is boarded up and in disrepair, it has been like this for over 20 years, people stand in front of it waiting for the 243 bus completely unaware of its significance. I only became aware of its meteorological importance when I noticed a blue plaque commemorating one of its early inhabitants Luke Howard: the namer of clouds. I was captivated by the plaque and the idea that one person had been responsible for naming this most transient and ephemeral of things, clouds. I embarked upon a series of performances celebrating the romantic and scientific notions that propelled Howard’s amateur enquiries. This culminated in a guided tour of clouds in the collection of Tate Britain, bringing together meteorologists, historians and cloud enthusiasts. Including contributions from: John E Thornes (author of John Constable’s Skies: a fusion of art and science), Giles Harrison and Maarten Aubaum (meteorologists from Reading University), Howard and Sylvia Oliver (on the history of Luke Howard) and Gavin Pretor-Pinney (founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society).

The guided tour culminated in me turning into a cloud.

The Namer of Clouds Lived and Died Here, 2009

There's a Strange Wind Blowing

Inside a kitchen cabinet lies the complex geology of a Mountain, from its highest peak to its deepest crevice. Atop, around and inside this mountain we follow the fictional meeting of Walt Disney and 19th century forgotten female explorer Annie Smith Peck. Driven by ideas of representation, authenticity and the fake “There’s a Strange Wind Blowing” examines the space between illusion and reality whilst exposing process. Does the audience choose to suspend their disbelief even though the puppeteers are in full view? Or do they choose to focus on the mechanics of illusion and wish fulfilment being laid bare before them? Inspired by the urban myth that Disney was cryogenically frozen after his death, the show unfolds to tell the tale of two people obsessed with time, self–preservation and man’s pursuit to conquer nature.

Original score by Daniel O’Sullivan

Decosa Tradition

I discovered Decosa whilst on a residency in the Czech Republic, this thin polystyrene sheeting printed with a wood grain effect, is a very convincing fake. Decosa is popular in Bohemia and Germany, giving a pseudo chalet-feel to any room in your house. I bought a pack containing 12 thin planks and used it to construct a huge block of wood, although slightly incongruous it looked like solid wood but was as light as a feather.

Decosa Tradition, Stockholm Keifer/pin

Decosa’s fake/real materiality touched on many things that had become important in my work, throwing into question notions of authenticity and man’s desire to mimic and conquer nature. During a short residency at Camden Arts Centre, I made 100 blocks of wood constructed from Decosa and invited visitors to build their own monumental sculptures. With a subtle nod to the minimalists of the 60’s and 70’s, sculptures were created and dismantled over the course of three days. People’s movements were mapped in the space and used as the basis for developing a ritual dance for Decosa. This was the development of an invented tradition highlighting the DIY store as an alternative temple of worship in a secular society: a new place for self-improvement.Original Score by Daniel O’Sullivan.

The Library of Secrets

The Library of Secrets is a mobile library conceived from the love of keeping and finding things in amongst the pages of books. Two confessional booths at either end of the structure invite you to leave your thoughts, wisdoms and secrets amongst the pages of one or more of the 400 books in the library’s collection. Peruse the shelves for your favourite 19th or 20th century classic or maybe just rummage through the books to find other peoples secrets.

Between 2007-2008 The Library took up residence in different venues across Whitstable as part of Whitstable Biennale 2008. For a whole year The Library of Secrets hosted a series of events including the Book Club Debate, which met every 6 weeks. The Book Club focused on discussing books that inspired the films, local hero Peter Cushing, starred in including; Dracula, Lolita, The Hound of the Baskerville’s, Frankenstein, Nineteen Eighty Four and The End of the Affair. These classics are more often imbedded in our knowledge through their film adaptation rather than the original novel. The Book Club Debates were chaired by myself and a host of visiting experts, lively debate was followed by a screening of the film each book inspired. The Book Club Debate was documented through a series of book reviews written by myself and members of the Book Club.

Since the Whitstable Biennale The Library has travelled to different locations around the UK including Camden Arts Centre, The New Art Gallery Walsall, Kaleidoscope Gallery Sevenoaks and The London Print Studios.

The Library of Secrets also became a mini publishing house producing a series of artist’s books that chart the development of the library and its relationship with its members. The books and multiples that have been produced include, ‘The Book Club Debate Whitstable’, ‘The Writing Challenge’ and ‘Things Found Inside Books’.

The Answer Lies at the End of the Line

The answer is Stanmore, a town with a wartime secret. In 1942 Stanmore was the home to an undisclosed outstation that was built to house 57 Turing Bomb machines; the technology used by Britain’s World War Two code breakers at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma code.

Art on the Underground commissioned me to create a project for Stanmore Station (at the end of the Jubilee line). I was inspired by Stanmore’s connection to Bletchley Park and discovered that some code breakers had been recruited for their ability to solve The Daily Telegraph crossword in under 12 minutes. London Underground also has a wartime connection to crosswords. During the Blitz millions sheltered in the Underground stations and London Transport used crossword puzzles on the reverse of information leaflets to help keep people entertained.

Working with groups and organisations I produced a series of crosswords that offer an alternative guide to Stanmore and reveal something of the knowledge, stories and specialisms of those encountered. The puzzles represent the Stanmore Choral Society, staff at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, the Bird Walk of Canons Park, Stanmore Bowls Club, London Underground staff, Bletchley Park veterans and local stories about Stanmore’s infamous Duke of Chandos. I collaborated with setters Geoff Heath (aka “Aeronaut’) and Roy Dean (setter for the Times) and the self-titled Stanmore Puzzlers to compile the crosswords.

The puzzles form the basis of the artwork at Stanmore station. The first challenge was to solve the puzzles in booklets that were distributed across the Jubilee Line. As the project title suggests the answers can only be found at Stanmore station, alongside a series of artworks that unpick the clues to some of the puzzles.

For those prepared to take the challenge the answers really do lie at the end of the line.

Building the Matterhorn

Building the Matterhorn, is about man's absurd desire to conquer nature, whilst examining the relationship between photography and authenticity.

Building the matterhorn.mov

Old Men's Flesh

A crucifix rested on his forearm. Bleary blue black lines constructing a memorial to his mother. It moved, stretching and pulling as he lifted the pint to his mouth. Jimmy started to talk and so the rest followed. Each one with at least one tattoo emblazoned on their person. The soft glow of the fruit machine reflected on their exposed skin, illuminating a proclamation of love or allegiance.

And so began a series entitled Old Mens Flesh a catalogue of encounters with strangers. Focusing on the male drinking culture, the project uses men's tattoos’ as a starting point for entering into conversation. As tattoos are collected they are transferred and archived on to a tablecloth. The marks are faded and blurry like the tattoos, allowing for different interpretations. People are then invited to the cloth and in exchange for tea, cake and beer, are asked to stitch the tattoos. The act of stitching reflects the act of tattooing. Every stitch like every prick of the flesh, fastening and embedding a yearning or a memory.